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How Maliki Broke Iraq

The Nuri al-Maliki era in Iraq appears to be over. I say “appears” because, although the Iraqi prime minister has reportedly told his most loyal troops to stand down and accept the results of the constitutional process. His putative replacement, Haider al-Abadi, has but 30 days to put together an inclusive cabinet and platform that can win an absolute majority vote in Iraq’s 329-member parliament. So the game is not yet over, and Maliki remains in office until Abadi, or another nominee, wins the parliamentary vote. Still, few are willing to ask him to form a government even if Abadi were to fail—too much has gone wrong in Maliki’s 8-year tenure, and he’s alienated too many along the way with his heavy-handed political tactics and his incompetence (especially on military matters), nepotism and corruption.

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This is an extraordinary turn of events for a leader who did better than ever in the March 2014 elections, garnering a personal vote tally of 700,000, far more than any rival. What happened? The short answer is Mosul—the fall of Iraq’s second city and almost a third of Iraq’s territory, and much of its Sunni Arab minority, to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), with tens of thousands of Iraqi troops melting in the face of a few thousand well-armed but ragtag ISIL fighters. The deeper story involves the morphing of Iraq’s al Qaeda remnants into the powerful ISIL fighting force in the Syrian civil war.

But a national disaster this great cannot be blamed solely on an outside force. The Sunni Arabs who joined the ISIL “surge” did so because Maliki had alienated them. The army that collapsed in Mosul was led by generals chosen for their loyalty to Maliki, not for their competence. His micromanaging of military decisions due to fear of a coup, his tolerance of corruption and relative indifference to a residual U.S. military presence to help train and assess the Iraqi military—all of it contributed to the dramatic failure that we see before us now. But the core reason was Maliki’s inability to trust, to reach out to other groups and share power even within his Shia community. Unlike some of his contemporaries in the Shia Dawa religious party/underground movement, he was never able to overcome his conspiratorial roots, understand other groups or appreciate the Western values America sought to implement in Iraq. Perhaps this is not just his epithet, but that of the whole Iraqi political system he led.

To examine this deepest question, it’s necessary to review America’s goals in Iraq. As President George W. Bush made exhaustively clear in his January 2005 second Inaugural Address, America’s whole moral purpose, and post-9/11 security, rested on bringing democracy to the world, beginning with the Middle East; and there, with its central location and oil riches second only to Saudi Arabia’s, Iraq was the prize.

But Iraq, following America’s 2003 military triumph, didn’t adhere to America’s democratic plan, such as it was, even with thousands of American troops patrolling the country’s trash-strewn streets. Despite successes such as the 2004 victories over al Qaeda in Fallujah and the radical Shia Mahdi Army in Najaf, and the “purple finger” election in 2005 and adoption of a Western-inspired constitution, by mid-2006, the American project in Iraq was in tatters as Shia and Sunni death squads drove the country to near civil war.

In this desperate situation, new Iraqi elections produced an impasse; all that the U.S. government and Iraqi political leaders could agree on was that Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the hapless prime minister at the time, had to go. As months dragged by and no solid candidate emerged, both Americans and Iraqis turned to Maliki, then a Dawa Party member and parliamentarian. Few knew him well, but he appeared decisive and courageous, and could wield power. By mid-2006 he was elected prime minister.

James Jeffrey is former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and Philip Solondz fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.